Mossad uses Holocaust biography to get German passport

With spies and agents appearing more frequently in the news every day, finding Mossad in the mixture does not seem greatly surprising. After all, they are one of the most internationally active espionage organizations in the world, made famous by films like Munich (2005) and successful operations against Israel’s enemies in Gaza, the West Bank, and other parts of Palestine. The recent up-cropping, however, has had grave consequences for German-Israeli relations, as a Mossad spy was captured in Warsaw with a German passport obtained by inventing a story of persecution and family ties to the infamous Nazi Holocaust.

In a report in Der Spiegel, two Jews from Israel had appeared in Cologne looking for naturalization papers for a man claiming to be named Michael Bodenheimer, who was allegedly descent from German Jews. He appeared with a man who was then going by the name of Alexander Verin, who provided a marriage certificate and passport supposedly belonging to Bodenheimer’s parents. Since Germany’s constitution, written with heavy influence from occupying Allied armies, has an section specifically designed to make naturalization of Jews easier, and the German government gets about 3,000 cases like this a year, the whole process was done without a great deal of investigation or thought, and Bodenheimer was naturalized swiftly.

Earlier this month, however, Alexander Verin, now going by the name Uri Brodsky, was arrested in Warsaw. Polish police are presently holding the man, who is under heavy suspicion from the German government for conducting espionage activities against the German state, illegally obtaining government documents and assisting Michael Bodenheimer, whose story of Nazi persecution turned out to be fake, get to Dubai where he participated in the assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai.

The German government, long having close relations with Israel, a state which Germany helped fund in its early days, is not so upset about the murder of the Hamas official as they are with the exploitation of the Nazi Holocaust, a very sensitive area in recent German memory, and the illegal operation of espionage activities on German soil without permission of the German government, which is also mentioned in the extremely long German constitution. They are presently demanding that Poland extradite the agent to Germany that he may be tried in a German court, in which he could face up to five years in prison.

The Israeli government has demanded in turn that Verin/Brodsky be returned to Israel, to avoid conflict with the German government.